How to Find Sociology Resources

Politics and international relations are two very broad descriptions incorporating elements of many different subjects such as economics, business, law, education and even history. The University Library uses the Dewey Decimal Classification scheme (go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_decimal for a quick introduction ) to organise books and other materials; politics is at 320 and IR roughly 327. They are parts of social science and can be found on Floor 6 of The Sir Duncan Rice Library.

This guide aims to give you a very quick introduction to the various resources available to you. If you would like any further information or help with finding and using resources, please contact the Social Science Subject Team based on Floor 6 of The Sir Duncan Rice Library, or email the Information Consultant for Politics and International Relations, Claire Molloy: c.a.l.molloy@abdn.ac.uk .

New to the Library?

Getting Inside: The Sir Duncan Rice Library is on the west-side of campus off Bedford Road - you can't miss it, it is the huge, stripy, glass building! Anyone can visit the Sir Duncan Rice Library but as a student you will need your University ID card to get in and borrow items.
Opening Hours: Our opening hours vary depending on the time in the academic year - full details are here: http://bit.ly/TSDRL_opening-hours
Borrowing: Undergraduates and taught Postgraduates can borrow up to 20 items, Research students can borrow up to 40. If you are an on campus student you will need your ID card and to set up a PIN to allow you to use the self-issue kiosks (these are like self-serve at the supermarket!). Details of how to set up a PIN are emailed out at the start of the first semester or you can email the Subject Team: library@abdn.ac.uk .
Loan Periods: There are many different loan periods depending on the demand on an item from Heavy Demand (overnight), right through to full academic year. All loans are subject to recall which means you may be asked to return items before the original due date. You can find out about borrowing, loans and recalls on the library website.
How is The Sir Duncan Rice Library laid out?: As noted above we use Dewey Decimal to order our materials and Floors 3-7 are where we hold these. The Entrance or Ground Floor is where you will find the café and the Welcome Desk as well as the returns area and the main swipe gates into the Library. Floor 1 has the main issue desk, heavy demand area and various different study zones. Floor 2 has the main computer classrooms and the hard copy periodicals. Each of the 'collection' floors has various types of study space including silent study rooms, study desk, PCs and comfy seating. You will also find an enquiry point on these floors where you can ask for help finding that book you really need! You can find out more about the various types of study space on our website and more detail about how we organise the collections floors can be found in our library guides: Floor 6 Classmarks and other Floor classmark guides .
But how do I work out which floor items are on?: In order to find your reading you should use our Resource Discovery tool which is called Primo. It allows you to search by title, author or even subject in order to find the e-link or the shelf location. Log in to Primo, click on Advanced Search (to give you a really good search!) and then try one of the following:
• The Books+ tab lists the thousands of titles we have full immediate e-access to.
• The Articles+ tab details thousands of articles, book reviews and more.

Note, you won't see these options in the Basic search screen you see when you first go to Primo.

There is a handy guide all about Primo. We have access to millions of items, some are in e-format, some are physical and held in one of our on campus libraries, but some are held in our store located a few miles away. Primo tells you where and how to access an item - anything not on campus or in e-format can be 'requested' using the link in Primo.

Finding Resources

You can use Primo to find items to read, particularly where you have been given details in a reading list but we have other tools you can use to find even more. Resources such as Sociological Abstracts (available via ProQuest ) which provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,809 serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers. Records added since 1963 contain in-depth and non-evaluative abstracts of journal articles. A quick guide to Sociological Abstracts is available . International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS): (available via ProQuest) produced by the London School of Economics and covers social and cultural anthropology, sociology, education, economics, and the political sciences. It provides access to over 2.5 million references dating back to 1951 and current data is taken from over 2,800 selected journals and around 7000 books per annum. A quick guide to IBSS is available.

We pay a lot of money for resources such as these and you will have to log in to read anything you find - check out the relevant library guide for details.

Social Theory offers an extensive selection of documents that explore the complexities and interpret the nature of social behaviour and organization. The collection includes more than 122,000 pages from 346 works by 100 authors. Highlights include 33 volumes of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels and nearly 26,000 pages of German language content. See the quick guide to the Social Theory database .

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) covers open access journal from across the world and across many disciplines.

The Hathi Trust : Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. Anyone can view public domain materials - some is not protected by copyright.

OECD iLibrary is the online library of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) featuring its books, working papers and statistics and is the gateway to OECD's analysis and data. It contains content published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), the OECD Development Centre, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), and the International Transport Forum (ITF).

UK Data Archive is the UK's only nationally-funded research infrastructure for the curation and provision of access to social science data. The service provides unified access to the UK's largest collection of social, economic and population data for research and teaching purposes covering a range of different disciplines

Box of Broadcasts (BOB) contains BBC broadcasts since 1990s and permanent archive of BBC, ITV and Channel 4 and related broadcasts as well as recording of 65 free to air tv channels - millions of broadcasts. Saved lists, create clips...

Resources by Geographical Region

There are lots of Open Access (OA) and other resources available - OA means that these are free to read, whereas other resources may require you to log in (like IBSS) to search and log in to read anything you find.

Africa: African Journals Online (AJOL) is a collection of OA and paid for journals. It is the world's largest and preeminent platform of African-published scholarly journals. AJOL is a Non-Profit Organisation that (since 1998) works to increase global & continental online access, awareness, quality & use of African-published, peer-reviewed research.

Africa Portal is a research repository and expert analysis hub on African affairs. This open-access research repository holds over 9 000 reports, occasional papers and policy briefs which are available for free, full-text download.
Latin America: AMELICA is a portal of open access journals

REDALYC is a bibliographic database and index of open access journals

LATININDEX is a bibliographic database and index.
Middle East: CyberOrient is a semi-annual interdisciplinary OA journal published by the American Anthropological Association, the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, and the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies of Lund University. CyberOrient presents original, peer-reviewed articles, comments and books reviews on the online representation of any aspect of Middle Eastern cultures, Islam, the imagined “Orient” and the use and impact of the internet and new media in the Middle East and Islamic countries.

Arabic Collections Online is a publicly available digital library of public domain Arabic language content. ACO currently provides digital access to 17,170 volumes across 10,110 subjects drawn from rich Arabic collections of distinguished research libraries.
Asia: The Asian Regional Open Access Survey from 2017 gives lots of detail of how to access various OA resources such as theses and journals from institutions across the region.
Eastern Europe: Radio Free Europe has a mission to promote democratic values and institutions and advance human rights by including reporting the news in countries where a free press is banned by the government or not fully established. These pages give some really useful information.

The University of California Berkeley Library has created this wonderful list of open access resources such as journals and images from across the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe.

Reference Management

You might find it useful to organise the references you have found. There are many different free and 'freemium' resources available to help you with your reference management. Try using Wikipedia's Comparison of reference management software to compare them. UoA currently subscribe to RefWorks.

Questions?

Contact the Information Consultant for sociology Claire Molloy: c.a.l.molloy@abdn.ac.uk

Last revised by Claire Molloy, August 2023